“It’s beyond language.” So speaks ex-clergyman Christopher Roulston in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. For McGuinness, the limitations of language are both restriction and liberation, something to be railed against as much as it is to be manipulated.

In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler identifies an unsettling problem at the heart of the idea of feminism. Feminism, she argues, imagines the idea of ‘women’ as a common identity that all women share and that unites them all. But where does our idea of what ‘women’ are come from?

“The house has grown cold, the province has grown lonely…The temple of the Lord is ransacked…Dance in this deserted temple of the Lord.”

As the whistle blew in Thiepval wood at 7:30 am on 1st July 1916, the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division began their march in to no-man’s land under a hail of German bullets. Today, their ghosts are still marching on banners and on gable walls throughout Northern Ireland.

2016 has been a year of what feels like almost constant commemoration in Ireland as the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916 is marked in lectures, art exhibitions, television programmes and parades. But we are also in the middle of commemorating the Great War, a war that for a very long time in post-independence Ireland, was a subject of embarrassment rather than remembrance in what the historian R. F. Foster calls “a policy of intentional amnesia”.

The American industrialist Henry Ford is famous for inventing the Model T Ford, the world’s first affordable mass produced car. The Model T Ford was not Henry Ford’s most astonishing invention.

In 1914, Ford shocked the world by announcing that he was raising the rate of pay in his plants to $5 an hour. This more than doubled his workers’ wages. At the same time, Ford decided to limit the number of hours that his workers were allowed to work. Initially, he limited his workers to six eight hour shifts from Monday to Saturday, which he further reduced in 1926 to five eight hour shifts from Monday to Friday. In doing so, Ford invented both the modern conception of the working week and the idea of leisure time.

Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things is an unusual play because we see the events of the story subjectively, though the eyes of its main character, Emma. We experience the world as she experiences it. When Emma takes drugs, the lights glow brighter and voices slow down. People seem to become other people. Objects disappear and reappear unexpectedly. When her experience of events becomes fragmented, the action of the play becomes fragmented. We see her world from the inside, as opposed to seeing the reality of the events that she is experiencing from the outside.

On 14 April 2010, three weeks before the general election, David Hare was on stage for a Platform talk at the Lyttelton Theatre and spoke of a frustrating failure. His play The Absence of War, premiered in the Olivier in 1993, had fictionalized Labour’s doomed 1992 election campaign, which ended with John Major still in Number Ten, and was followed by Neil Kinnock’s resignation as party leader, and, under John Smith and Tony Blair, the birth of New Labour. Hare told his Platform audience that he had been unable to convince any producing theatre to revive The Absence of War for the 2010 poll: “It is about the roots of New Labour and, now that we assume New Labour is coming to an end in three weeks’ time, it would be fantastic to show that play.”

What was 'The Agency'? What are PMQs? How do party leadership elections work? Find out more about parliament, its history and the people who have walked its halls in our short guide to the terms referenced in David Hare's The Absence of War.

Ideology shapes the way that we think and behave as members of society. An ideology is a set of conscious and unconscious ideas and beliefs that a group of people hold about the way that the world works. These ideas shape their sense of what is right and wrong. They shape their sense of what is normal and abnormal behaviour. They define their ambitions and their goals. At a deeper level, they shape their sense of reality.